Perceptions of graduating health professional students of their interprofessional education experiences during pre-licensure education

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to identify graduating students’ perspectives on what makes prelicensure interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional collaboration (IPC) experiences valuable and effective and to identify other opportunities for effective IPE.

Telephone interviews were conducted with 12 students in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and physiotherapy during their final year of training and thematically analyzed the verbatim transcripts.

The study found factors that make existing IPE experiences valuable and effective and could facilitate leverage of other curricular opportunities include: 1) experiential learning in clinical and classroom contexts, 2) relevancy of the IPE experiences, 3) opportunities for role clarification, 4) supervisors’ influence (e.g., modeling collaborative skills), and 5) integration of IPE and IPC experiences into the existing curriculum.